Digital adspend in China will overtake both newspaper and outdoor advertising by the end of this year, with the gap set to widen in 2009, according to figures from GroupM.

The media group’s ‘This year, next year’ forecast predicts that the combined spend for internet and other digital advertising (principally mobile and LCD screens) will reach $3.6 billion this year, and $5.2 billion in 2009. In contrast newspaper adspend is projected to show steady, if modest, growth from US$3.2 billion in 2007 to $3.6 billion in 2009.

The adspend for out of home, meanwhile, is expected to reach $3.1 billion in 2008, growing slightly to $3.9 billion by the end of 2009.

The boom in digital advertising is partly responsible for the declining share of total media occupied by television. While TV will remain the dominant medium in terms of advertising dollars (projected to rake in almost US$20 billion in 2008 and $23 billion in 2009), its share of total media is set to decline, from 65 per cent in 2007, to 63 per cent in 2008 and 61 per cent in 2009.

Source: www.brandrepublic.asia

The China market, although large, still has low penetration rates and this is an excellent indicator for future growth. According to the Survey Report on Online Shopping in China 2008 that released by China Internet Network Information Center, stated the total amount of online shopping in 19 big cities in China had reached CNY16.2 billion in the first half of 2008.

*These cities are Chongqing, Tianjin, Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, Dalian, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiamen, Jinan, Qingdao, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xi’an

Source: CNNIC June 2008 online shopping research report

BEIJING, China September 16, 2008—Dr Mathew McDougall, chief executive officer and executive chairman of SinoTech Group, today announced the appointment of Tim Haynes, as chief digital officer for SinoTech Group. Prior to this role, Haynes had held positions at various agencies including the Tomorrow Group, a Hong Kong based agency where he lead the interactive practice and has previously worked in Australia and the UK.

“Tim is a visionary and an innovator, as well as a smart businessman – as his success growing SinoTech Group in Shanghai demonstrates,” said Dr Mathew McDougall. “Tim brings to SinoTech Group those essential qualities, plus a keen marketing sense and a strong reputation in the digital universe. He will use his talent and ability to further extend the SinoTech Group as a digital powerhouse.”

“Digital was viewed more as a channel in the past, where the creative process, the ideation process, started at the beginning more with the traditional side of the business, and digital would be one way you can execute,” Haynes says. “Now, both the agency and clients realize that digital is not just a channel. It’s really changed the whole marketing process. I will use SinoTech Group’s extensive digital offerings to bring full interactive solutions to our clients and partners.”

I read with interest the story on Venture Beat that said yet another U.S. web company was struggling. They sited the quitting of the MySpace China chief executive Luo Chuan as evidence of a failing company.  The general view of why MySpace had difficultly in building a market precence in China and I suggest it comes down to fundermentally not getting the localisation right…. MySpace provided translations of its English-based site into other languages and it invested in building out teams to focus on promoting and selling ads in China. But it appears that this “localization” didn’t go so far as to let regional managers make significant changes to the translated versions.

This is in contrast to Facebook and hi5 who let users recommend their own translations, which helps ensure that things like popular colloquialisms make it in. They also polish those version with the help of professional translators. 

Friendster has focused on translating the site into Asian languages, to help it solidify its market share in the region (most recently, it introduced a mobile version of traditional Chinese). It boasts millions of ethnic Chinese users in other parts of Asia, but it’s not clear if that’s translated to more users in China.

In sum, given MySpace’s existing localization strategy and the trouble it and other U.S. companies have in reaching Chinese users, it seems to me that MySpace could have done well to try and do more with localising MySpace.

Luo Chuan is said to have left to join a Chinese based video startup.

Social Media Marketing is now getting a lot of interest, not just from the companies operating at the edge but by some mainstream brands. Given this level of interest it is important to determine if the hype is matching the rhetoric and give you the facts should you want to make the case for your own company’s involvement.

The Society for New Communications Research recently published their report titled, “New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations” that provides several case studies illustrating how social media has benefited organizations like the American Red Cross, the Mayo Clinic and Quicken Loans. Among their findings, “Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information. Fifty-seven percent of this group of early social media adopters reported that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities, while 27% reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.”

Real Fresh TV has been conducting a study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies in the UK. The website has some interesting information about the largest UK companies and their adoption of social media. I will continue to review and give commentary once the findings become clearer.

Another report that is doing the rounds in the blogoshere is the Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3 research report. As a summary, this report looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries. One finding in this study was that social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s reputation. “34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.”

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”

Comscore released a report the growth of social networking worldwide. This report stated that social networking use grew 25% year over year worldwide, with significant increases in Europe and the Middle East.

Moreover, Rapleaf released the results of their study examining the gender and age of social network users. Note that these two studies were conducted independent of each other, so don’t confuse the results between them.

Chris Kenton wrote a post called, New Social Media Marketing Adoption Report where he provided a marketing whitepaper entitled “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media. This report showed a clear acceleration in adoption of social media as a marketing practice, and is fairly balanced about its value and application, despite all the frothy hype and counter-hype in business reporting.

Anyone that has additional reports then please post the links in the comments section for others to review and feedback.

Beijing, China— 27th August 2008: Chinese leading interactive technology and digital marketing company SinoTech Media (www.sinotechmedia.com.cn) announced today that they have signed a partnership agreement with IT168 (www.it168.com), one of the largest information platform for IT products in China. SinoTech Media will act as the exclusive ad agency for the unsold advertising space and international traffic in the website of www.it168.com.

IT168.com is one leading website providing individual netizens and enterprisers with mainstream information on the IT products and IT business.

This new agreement will provide SinoTech Media with the rights to promote and sell targeted advertising for the website www.it168.com. Further, IT168 will license their Ad Technology from SinoTech Media for ad serving and web analytics. This ad technology, known as SinoAnalytics will serve all the advertising needs under the agreement.

Ms. Wang Xiaojie, VIP Account Director of IT168 said, “We are excited to have SinoTech Media help us drive our international advertising revenue. I also believe their Advertising technology will help us manage these advertising campaigns more efficiently.”

Moreover, Dr. Mathew McDougall; the Group CEO and Executive Chairman for SinoTech Group said, “I am pleased that SinoTech media has this opportunity to provide advertising site representation to the largest IT information website in China. This deal will help our publishing partners more effectively monetize traffic and provide our advertisers to the right audience in Chinese IT industry.”

BEIJING, CHINA 20th August 2008- SinoTech Group (www.sinotechgroup.com.cn) announced today that they have signed a strategic partnership with US based Advantix Media.

Texas based, Advantix Media provides Search Marketing services to well known customers in verticals markets such as automotive, education and travel. “This is an exciting strategic partnership.” said Dr. Mathew McDougall, the Group CEO and Executive Chairman for SinoTech Group, “SinoTech will benefit by providing products and services into the US through this partnership. We will provide Advantix’s clients with access to the Asian markets and will conduct Agency Services, Search Marketing and creative services.”

“Asia is a rapidly developing online market, particularly China, so this partnership will extend our online marketing and advertising solutions offering into Asia Pacific; however, China will be the first market we will focus on and we expect to gain quick wins” continued John Phillips, co-founder and Principal.

SinoTech Group is attending the Search Engine Strategies event in San Jose, US this week. Both Dr Mathew McDougall and Laker Chen will attend the conference as well as meet with prospective partners.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is the leading global conference & expo series that educates delegates on search engine marketing (SEM), including optimization (SEO) and advertising strategies, tactics and best practices.

Over the course of this week, this blog will track the sessions and highlight some of the speakers.

Its time for Yahoo! to launch a new product on the http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/.

Its Yahoo! Fire Eagle (Beta)
Yahoo released its Fire Eagle location-based social networking platform from beta, opening the technology to developers and the public. Fire Eagle allows users to update their various social networking profiles with information about where they are.

What is Fire Eagle?

According to Yahoo! The tool is of great use if you ( developer) Want to make your website or mobile application more relevant or responsive to a user’s location? Or maybe you’ve found a way to capture user location and want to find cool uses for this info? By doing the heavy lifting for you and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

The Open API tool (Fire Eagle) is of great help to the developers or publishers to gain location information about the end user.
Fire Eagle and the Fire Eagle Developer APIs:

Fire Eagle is a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services. It’s a place where users can store and manage information about their current location that trusted apps and sites can update or access.

Fire Eagle exposes a rich set of web services that allow developers to write location-aware applications.

Update anywhere:
- Send updates from your phone
- Update from your favorite sites
- Do it automatically or manually

Choose what to share:
- You control your data
- You choose who to share with

Have fun on the web:
- Show your location on your blog
- Share it with your friends
- Discover cool stuff around you
- You choose how much to share

Fire Eagle is a mobile search application in the making and its up to the creativity of the developers to make a good use of it!

The IAB released an announcement that they have released a new benchmark study which suggests that online publishers are increasingly turning to sales intermediaries known as ad networks to sell off excess inventories. The use of “ad networks” surged from 5% of total ad impressions sold in 2006 to 30% in 2007, according to this newly released “Digital Pricing Benchmarking Study”.

The report stated that the reasons for the rapid growth in the use of ad networks is two-fold:

• Lack of adequate pricing tools and inventory management discipline contributed to the growth in available ad space. This is causing publishers to seek out ways to sell large inventories of unsold ads. Publishers often lack basic information on realized prices and inventory sold by client and channel, limiting management’s ability to make effective decisions.

• Large marketers continue to shift significant portions of their advertising budgets online and view ad networks as an effective way to achieve greater buying scale and drive down CPMs.

Another important finding of the study is that publishers who actively manage and use multiple ad networks can achieve higher revenues on display ads sold via networks. The benchmarking study finds publishers vary in their adoption of ad networks, the approaches used and the results attained but overall finds that the keys for success for online publishers are having dedicated staff, better tools and metrics that allow constant vigilance in managing ad pricing, reported sell rates and channel conflicts.

To view the complete study, please go to www.iab.net/digital_pricing_research.